I really want to do this with both my girls. I want to get them on BC at the onset of puberty. But the fathers disagree with me. They think it will make the girls feel like we are giving them permission to have sex.

No, it gives permission to the boys to have sex, not the girls. The girls don't need to tell any of the boys that they are on the pill. Unless, or course ...

My feelings are if they want to they are going to regardless of what I want for them.

Then they will do what they want to do when they want to do it.

The fathers are engaging in a fallacy. By their assertion, every pregnant girl had permission to engage in sex. If birth control equates with permission, then what does lack of birth control equate to? Babies.

I'd rather them be prepared. I'm curious to see how this unfolds when my girls hit puberty. I hope we can all come to an agreement but it's likely I will end up pissing someone off and just doing what I think is best any ways. I guess this is one subject I'd rather piss of the other parent than fold on.

Put 'em on birth control. Piss off everyone. Just tell any of them to give you $250,000 in cash for each daughter and then you will consider whether your daughters should be on birth control. Tell them that's the cost of the mistake, so if they think it is such a good idea, they can pay for it.

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John 14:2 :: In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

As a society we're so completely stupid on this issue it isn't even funny.What always gets me is that it's apparent that the problem isn't really contraception, or for that matter abortion; but parental control.

I don't really see any kind of rational solution in the near, or distant future.

Parental control is a big issue when it comes to public education. Poor people don't have many options when it comes to educating their children. For example, I don't make enough money to pay for a private school and even if we (my wife and I) had enough time to homeschool we understand and recognize our limitations. So we send them to the public school nearest to us and try to help augment their education as much as possible at home.

We are concerned about their future, welfare, health and overall experience in life. We try our best to raise them with our values and teach them to make good choices.

Just because we are poor doesn't mean we don't care about how they are being raised in the school system.

This past Friday our oldest daughter woke up with a headache. My wife told her teacher about the headache and asked her to keep an eye on her and that if it got worse to call her. My wife just started working in an after school program at the school and goes in at 2:30 till 6:00. I work now from 8:30 till 4 or 5:30 depending on the work load each day.

I get a call from my wife at 3:00 telling me that Em still had the headache but now also had a fever. The teacher never sent her to the nurse. She simply told our daughter that there was nothing wrong with her and that she could make it. However, now it is too late in the game for my wife to find someone to take her place because they are understaffed to begin with and the after school program does not allow children with fever's to be present. So I have to leave work to come pick her up.

This teacher is going to get a talking to on Monday. She took it upon herself, without any medical background, to determine that my child was essentially faking feeling bad to get out of school. How much trouble would it have been for her to send my daughter to the school nurse to let her determine whether we needed to come pick her up?

We assumed everything was okay and the headache went away because no one ever called us.

What does this have to do with parental control? Well, we had no control because the teacher took it upon herself to make a determination as to our child's condition.

All we could do was scramble to react at the last minute. It left my co-worker in a jam and I can only hope that it doesn't reflect negatively on me since this was my first week at my new job.

The teacher took it upon herself to decide for us without giving it a second thought about how her decision would effect us.

Now, like I said previously...I would be disappointed in my daughter for having unprotected sex. Hopefully our daughter's trust in us will still be strong enough to where she can approach us with such heavy concerns as possibly being pregnant. In our situation both me and my wife oppose the idea of abortion for convenience. We would work with our daughter to make a choice and explain reassure her that we would help raise the baby if she chose to keep it but if she did not want to go through with the pregnancy then we would take her to a clinic to let PROFESSIONALS handle the situation and determine the best coarse of action to terminate the pregnancy. I think it is foolish and extremely dangerous to let a school nurse make those kinds of decisions. I don't like the idea of being left out of the loop when it comes to headaches and fevers. I absolutely hate the idea of being left out of the loop when it comes to this.

Thanks for the reply.Sorry if this comes off as a bit harsh, but as a teacher I've been in the same situation you just described.

Generally what I do is tell the child to go and sit at a quiet desk at the back of the room with their head down if they don't feel well, and to let me know if they want to call home.

Mostly they don't, I would guess because they know it's a huge inconvenience to the parents to come to the school and pick them up, and or their parents have jobs that don't easily allow them to leave. Adults tend to underestimate the comprehension of children when it comes to this.

She took it upon herself, without any medical background, to determine that my child was essentially faking feeling bad to get out of school. How much trouble would it have been for her to send my daughter to the school nurse to let her determine whether we needed to come pick her up?

We assumed everything was okay and the headache went away because no one ever called us.

What you mean is that you took it on yourself to assume that the teachers job also included nursing your daughters headache.

You are aware, presumably that a teachers job is to teach, and not be a nursemaid, yes?Don't blame the teacher for your decision to not keeping your daughter home for a day. That's on you. Trying to shirk the responsibility for what is an essential parenting duty onto that of a school teacher is half the problem.

As for your daughter eventually having sex, unprotected or otherwise the odds are overwhelming that it will happen without your knowledge or consent. In fact, I would speculate that you can never even imagine yourself saying "yes, dear go have wild sex with that boy/girl" or talking about oral sex "don't give blow jobs if you have a cold sore, or a cut on your gums", that sort of thing just doesn't happen.

By the time teenagers get to the point where they'll be ready to have sex either they have the tools and education to make appropriate choices or not. If you don't want your daughter learning about sex from school then ideally you'd teach her yourself, but again statistically that doesn't happen. Parents on the whole do not discuss sex with their kids until it's far too late. I didn't get the 'sex talk' until almost two full years after I'd been active sexually, and when I did it was couched in uncomfortable language and useless metaphors that likely would have not helped one iota had I had it two years earlier.

I think it is foolish and extremely dangerous to let a school nurse make those kinds of decisions. I don't like the idea of being left out of the loop when it comes to headaches and fevers. I absolutely hate the idea of being left out of the loop when it comes to this.

Again, you are almost certainly going to be out of the loop when she makes her choices. From the content of your paragraph it's also reasonably apparent that you're against the idea of abortion, which means that you're even LESS likely to be consulted by her if she's in a position where she has to decide what she wants to do. She already knows your answer.

If you don't want people like a school nurse to be in the position of helping your daughter decide things that you care about then the proper answer is to not put her in that position by empowering your daughter to decide on her own beforehand.

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One of the problems here is that we want contradictory things. First of all, even "protected" sex can result in a pregnancy. Nothing is 100% except complete abstinence, including not being raped. So a girl getting pregnant does not mean she was irresponsible. She may not be willing to explain the circumstances around the pregnancy, if, for example, she is known as the campus "skank" or unpopular "ugly" girl and the football captain raped her after the prom.

There is the "punishment" aspect where some people want the girl to "suffer the consequences" or "face up to her responsibilities" of having sex. They want the girl to view pregnancy as an unwelcome, unpleasant and scary outcome of sex. No Plan B or abortion for you, young lady! That would be letting you off easy. If you have sex, see what horrible thing might happen to you! Pregnancy! Ahhhhhh! Run for your lives!

At the same time, most of us think babies are absolutely the most marvelous things ever. Tiny, adorable, cute, fragile, helpless little bundles of potential. We want every baby to be treated as the precious miracle of life that it is. How can we balance that out? Pregnancy as a way to scare girls away from sex, and babies as wonderful and special?

The way I think about it is this. Sometimes the miracle of life just happens to occur inside the most unlikely people-- mentally disturbed homeless women, 12 year old incest victims, drug-addicted prostitutes with STD's, and our own hormone-addled teenaged darlings. And middle aged women on welfare with four kids already. And single career women who don't want any children. And women trying to leave abusive relationships. And women about to start chemotherapy. And illegal migrant women who will lose their sweatshop jobs if they miss too many days. Etc.

Maybe I am the contradictory one, but if a sperm and egg don't meet under the right circumstances, they should not become a baby. Because babies deserve to be cherished and loved and properly cared for, not viewed as a punishment, a threat, an inconvenience or an obstacle. So abortion and birth control should be easy and acceptable, not only for women who are deserving or nice or who had no choice about having sex.

I suspect it may be unintentional but you are comming at me from the wrong angle. My concern now is that you have done this before on another thread and pissed me off so bad I damn near gave up this forum.

I don't mind harshness as long as it is accurate. For example you seem to think I was leaving my childs medical needs up to the teacher and blaming her for my inconvienience...that's not the case. My complaint was that she did not send my child to the school nurse to make a determination.

Schools don't like children with fevers in their midst. The teacher did not take my childs temperature. The school nurse would have. My complaint is that the teacher decided that nothing was wrong with my child and refused to send her to the school nurse.

Once you acknowledge this I can address your other critisizms.

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Every night I flirt with death and every morning I wake up disappointed.

Hopefully this explains my perspective a bit better. If you need more we can split this conversation off to a chatter so as to not overly derail this topic. I'm happy to fully explain myself, or accept correction if I'm wrong.

I suspect it may be unintentional but you are coming at me from the wrong angle. My concern now is that you have done this before on another thread and pissed me off so bad I damn near gave up this forum.

I don't mind harshness as long as it is accurate. For example you seem to think I was leaving my child's medical needs up to the teacher and blaming her for my inconvenience...that's not the case. My complaint was that she did not send my child to the school nurse to make a determination.

Schools don't like children with fevers in their midst. The teacher did not take my child's temperature. The school nurse would have. My complaint is that the teacher decided that nothing was wrong with my child and refused to send her to the school nurse.

Once you acknowledge this I can address your other criticisms.

I'm afraid I just don't understand the nature of your upset in this case. First, I'm not sure how old your child is, so that may be relevant.

It seems that you wanted the teacher to send your child to see the nurse, yes?That's a pretty normal expectation; if a student looks ill, or states that they are ill then it's expected that the teacher report it.

If your child showed obvious signs of illness then the teacher should have sent her away, for the safety of the other students if for no other reason. I don't really have an argument with that.

Teachers are supposed to report pretty much *anything* that is out of the norm with children, whether it be strange behaviors or unusual marks. Pretty much all teachers understand this and do so. We're what you call 'mandated reporters'. Every year I spend about six hours going over the new rules laws and paperwork related to this, where you are is probably not all that different.

In your case it seems that the teacher already knew your daughter was not feeling 100% since you had called ahead.In other words you intentionally left the judgement to send the kid to the nurse at the teachers discretion, and didn't like the choice the teacher made.

It's possible that your daughter just sat with her head down all day, it's possible that she looked fine and was up running around playing, it's possible that the teacher wouldn't recognize a full blown hemorrhagic bleed out. I don't know and ultimately what I know does not matter in this instance since you're the parent. Presumably you'll find out when you call on Monday.

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Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.